Career Man

In Manhattan, directors of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. gathered at their routine monthly meeting last week for a duty that was far from routine. They elected a new president, Leroy A. Wilson,* 47, to run the largest business enterprise in the world. Walter Sherman Gifford, 63, who has headed the company for 23 years, moved up into the vacant board chairmanship.

The change, said new President Wilson, took him "completely by surprise." Just as surprised was the business world outside A.T. &T. Beyond his own vast company, lean, friendly Leroy August Wilson was not well known. Manhattan's financial writers, scrabbling through their files, found no mention of him. But they found ample evidence in A.T. & T. annals of what Leroy Wilson had done to get to the top.

Semipro. In the. last year, A.T. &T. has raised more than $1.1 billion in new capital, for the biggest expansion program in its history. Wilson, a vice president, had put the program through at a time when many another corporation was finding the capital market sticky. It was one of the big reasons he was picked when Walter Gifford decided that he would like to step aside. An easy talker, with a good memory for faces and names, new President Wilson is an impressive example of copybook maxims put into practice. "If you know what you're fitted to do and do it well," he once said, "your life will be a success."

As a boy in Terre Haute, Ind., Lee Wilson turned the crank on the old projector, and later played the piano, in his father's small movie house. He also had a paper route and he played cornet in the Methodist Church orchestra. To pay his way through Rose Polytechnic Institute (in Terre Haute), he shoveled iron ore, laid track for a railroad, and later played semi-pro baseball Sundays and nights.

Professional Engineer. Wilson took a job as a $110 a month clerk with Indiana Bell Telephone Co. the Monday after graduation. Hard work ("The night force knows me pretty well"), moderate ambition ("My only interest is in the challenge of a job, not its level") and a friendly manner ("I know them all by their first names") helped him move up fast. In 1929 he was transferred to the parent company, American Telephone & Telegraph, where he became general commercial engineer in 1942, vice president two years later.

Still sticking by the copybook, Wilson, a moderate drinker and smoker, will keep on walking at least a mile every night for exercise, taking an interest in local government and the Boy Scouts, commuting from Glen Ridge, N.J., where he lives in a seven-room house with his wife and 17-year-old daughter. His new job (salary: over $75,000 a year) will mean no change in his routine, except that "the night force will be seeing a lot more of me."

* No kin to the three Charles E. Wilsons (no kin to each other) who are top executives of General Motors Corp., General Electric Co. and Worthington Pump & Machinery Corp.; nor to Norman W. Wilson, head of Hammermill Paper Mill Co., Edward F. Wilson, head of Wilson & Co., John L. Wilson, head of St. Louis Public Service Co., Laroy W. Wilson, head of Advance Aluminum Castings Co., H. W. Wilson, head of H. W. Wilson Book Co., nor to any of the dozen-odd Wilsons who head other large U.S. companies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.